You are invited to the Veronika exhibition by the members of the Kamnik Photo Club, which will be on view from Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 6 p.m. on the plateau behind Kavarna Veronika.
There will be no opening due to the current covid-19 measures.
With the stories about Veronika from the Little Castle, we first face the naive and free-spirited question of how to photograph something that IS NOT, or that is JUST A MYTH. And yet reflection takes us a step further than this naivety. Almost three quarters of a century have passed since dr. Emilijan Cevc collected and presented ten of these stories in Kamniške Zbornik and tried to explain them in his own way. During this time, many different theoretical approaches to the study of myth arose.
The researcher Claude Levi-Strauss, who published his fundamental findings, was interesting to us for two reasons (Anthropologie structurale, 1958) around the time when Cevč's treatise was published in Kamniške Zbornik. The first reason is his thesis that there is no 'right' version of the myth and thus all its versions are 'correct'. Thus, the thesis about the contrast between myth and truth also turns out to be unproductive. There is another reason in to a paradigmatically different (new) way of reading different versions of myths. Instead of being trapped in a mere sequential (diachronic) setting and reading the stories one by one, in addition to the diachronic reading, it also offers us a simultaneous (synchronous) 'reading' of the stories - just as, for example, an orchestral score is read correctly. This can give us new, comparative insight into those structural elements of myth that are repeated and common, and those that are different and specific. These two reasons also guided our project about Veronica. We approached our photography project accordingly. On the one hand, the project focused on the thematization of common structural elements of this myth, which thus became thematic sets imbued with our subjectivity. On the other hand, the creative potential was manifested in those elements that differ and are specific.
In a way, this project is also a continuation of the Kamči project, because it is basically something similar, as we kept some aspects of the concept from FKK OFF 2019. One of them was to tackle the motif as a group and co-create the workflow together. At the same time, Veronika's idea turned out to be elusive, and in the process of research, which was an intertwining of both group and individual, the goal moved away from us again and again. As he moved away, we were left with shadows, which we then paid more attention to and looked for creative potential in them. This is how we allowed the elusive to at least "shadow" us. Therefore, it makes sense that the exhibition, in addition to the result, also shows the process of its creation. For this purpose, the back of the leaflet is also filled with photos of the creation process by thematic sections.
Members of the photo club have different backgrounds, prior knowledge, wishes and interests in photography. Despite this heterogeneity and apparent chaos, both in the process and in the result, a collective work and connection in researching a common theme is evident. If we pay attention to both the result and the process, we can observe the thematization of all the individual structural elements of our myth (Veronica, Little Castle, treasure, lake, dragon) in individual thematic clusters. At the same time, we can also see an example of a new version of the myth as a whole, where individual elements as motifs are placed on psychedelic backgrounds, and the girls as models are a modern, 'Instagram', kitsch version of Veronica. This modern version, where the myth is not the opposite of the truth, but the truth of our reality, is of course tied to the specifics of today. Once upon a time, a story as a myth had its function in a concrete historical and cultural context to make society work in a certain way. Just as at that time it captivated and astonished the audience through oral narration from generation to generation, so today the images of virtual reality fascinate people in a similar way. The function of virtual myths these days is that the images of smiling faces on the Internet take over people, that they are fascinated by the glamor of spectacular photos and act accordingly - they think, vote and of course buy.
